BANGALORE: India's software export sector is hoping that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will forcefully argue their case for an easy visa regime when he meets US President Barack Obama on Friday.

The Indian information technology industry has been steadily building up opinion against a proposed US law which makes work visas costlier and harder to come by. When Singh raises the issue with the American president, it will be a clear reflection of the importance that the Indian government attaches to a sector which earns more than $76 billion ( Rs4.7 lakh crore) in export revenue, 60% of it from the US.

"We have been talking to US lawmakers and multiple viewpoints suggest that restrictive clauses in the bill must be removed," said Som Mittal, president of the software industry body Nasscom.

"I hope the Prime Minister would tell them that we have done our bit, so it's their turn to do something," Mittal said. In the recent past, India has taken a few policy measures intended to benefit American corporations working here.

Among them are simplifying rules that govern transfer pricing agreements between US corporations and their India units — an area that has become highly litigious following tax demands by Indian authorities. The government has also put on hold a 'preferential market access' policy that calls for a majority of telecom equipment sold in India to be manufactured here.

While companies such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro are unwilling to discuss the sensitive issue in public, they are working behind the scenes to ensure that the environment for doing business in the US does not get any tougher.

Last month, Azim Premji, chairman of India's third-largest IT services company Wipro, had written to the Prime Minister asking him to seek the White House's intervention in removing some of the discriminatory proposals in the bill. Premji said the immigration bill would play a critical role in the Indo-US trade relations.

The comprehensive immigration reform bill, passed by the US Senate and being debated by the House of Representatives, is primarily aimed at giving citizenship to nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US.

But it also has restrictive visa provisions that could put Indian technology services companies at a disadvantage against their US-based counterparts such as IBM, HP or Accenture.

According to the Senate version of the bill passed in June, companies that have over 75% of their US workforce relying on H-1B or L-1 visas would be banned from getting any more visas by 2015.

The bill also demands that these companies bring down their visa-dependent workforce to 50% by 2017, a move that will result in higher costs for Indian software firms as they will be forced to hire local employees in the US.

Indian IT companies argue that US does not have sufficient skilled engineering talent.

The unemployment rate in the US has fallen from over 10% in 2009 to 7.3% in August 2013. But in the information technology sector, it is below the 4% level regarded as full employment.

The top four Indian outsourcers — Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Wipro and HCL Technologies — together employ over 35,000 software engineers in the US, with many of them being Indians working at onsite client locations.

At 64%, Indians made up the largest proportion of temporary workers entering the US on H-1B visas last year.

Analysts in Washington DC said they do not expect the Obama-Singh meeting to be gamechanger as a final decision will be taken by members of the US House of Representatives later this year.

"This meeting will be about the two economies; moreover Obama has so far taken a hands-off approach on this immigration bill," said Neil G Ruiz of the DCbased think tank The Brookings Institution. In a recent report for the Institution, Ruiz said USbased IT firms such as Accenture, IBM and Deloitte stand to benefit if the present version of the immigration bill gets passed as locals account for a larger proportion of their workforce.

On Wednesday, the US industry lobby Information Technology Industry Council sought the Obama administration's intervention to address what they called discriminatory policies by India that have the potential to cause them losses worth "hundreds of millions of dollars".